Content continues to dominate media headlines and marketing programs at many startups and small businesses. But is content marketing effective?

There’s very useful insight, especially for B2B (business-to-business) marketers in a recently published 2014 Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks Study. The study surveyed 1,217 marketers around the world in July and August 2013. I’ll share a link to the full study at the end of this post.

For those who don’t have the time to read the entire study, here are five key takeaways:

1. Content marketing is ineffective for many B2B marketers. Fewer than 10 percent of B2B marketers say that content marketing is “very effective” for them.

2. Pick the right social channels for your content strategy. Interestingly, the social channels that many businesses prefer – Facebook and Pinterest, for example, all received low approval ratings for effectiveness from content marketers. In fact, only one social network received positive approval ratings for effectiveness – LinkedIn (62 percent of content marketers found LinkedIn to be effective). Despite these findings, marketers are increasingly using many social channels, including those they are finding to be less effective.

Strategy Tip: Before you invest time developing and sharing content on a social network, consider whether your customers are likely to be using that network. Spreading content to non-customers might make you feel good, but will not help your bottom line.

3. Develop goals and a content marketing strategy. If you have been creating content without any strategy, you’re probably creating a lot of noise and little value,. You are not alone. More than half (56 percent) of B2B marketers have no strategy for their content marketing tactics. Tactics, without a goal and strategy, are futile. In fact, According to the study, B2B marketers with a content marketing strategy are 600 percent more likely to be effective. To put that in perspective, 84 percent of marketers who say they are ineffective at content marketing have no documented strategy.

4. Measure the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts. Unfortunately, web traffic continues to be the mostporno used metric for measuring the effectiveness of content marketing. Traffic helps you gauge whether people are responding to your content, but does not tell you whether people are buying your products or services.

Strategy Tip: Make sure that you carefully track conversions. In our own experience, traffic can be very noisy (low quality) and you can easily mistake an increase in traffic for success. For a list of other metrics used by marketers to measure the efficacy of content marketing efforts, see the graph below.

5. Don’t limit your content marketing to one or only a few tactics. B2B content marketers use an average of 13 tactics (up from 12 last year). Infographics, already popular last year, have increased in popularity (from 38 percent to 51 percent). In-person events continue to have the highest effectiveness rating from marketers.

Strategy Tip: Take some time today and list the tactics you’ve used over the past two weeks. Are you focusing on only one or two tactics? If so, it’s time to diversify!

If you can do it, great. If not, do what I do and hire a service. I use BlogMutt. Works great. Not too much money. And my blogging is DONE!

goodonya

Scott,

I am sure you have great services but this is one kind of spamming by dropping your company name in comments and appearing as 3rd party service. Use disclaimer next time as not sure anyone wants to deal with a CEO who drops name on comments.

http://blogmutt.com Scott Yates

I’m really sorry. I thought I was logged in as BlogMutt, not as me personally. I really wasn’t trying to deceive.

I really do use BlogMutt for my blog. The same BlogMutt writers who work on the BlogMutt blog work on the blogs of all our customers.

But I can totally understand the confusion you point out, and I am very sorry for that.

michael bian

Yeah! I love the ways, tips and ideas, Thanks!

Tens of thousands of the world's best and most successful entrepreneurs, businesses, agencies and nonprofits rely on crowdSPRING for affordable and risk-free custom logo design, web design, a new company name or other writing and design services. More than 168,000 designers and writers work on crowdSPRING. We create designs and names people love. 100% guaranteed.